The tea bag session “three and a half meals” is ready to come out.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “future consumption APP” (ID: lslb168), Author: Xiekang Yu.
Just like what happened with instant coffee before, teabags, which were once at the bottom of the tea culture contempt chain, have also set off a wave of “knocking down Lipton” through brand-new product forms, visual images and marketing methods. .
In this wave of new-style teabags, all the way are retail products made by offline tea brands, such as Hey Tea, Naixue’s tea, and tea beauty; all the way are the sub-brands incubated by tea brands, such as tea Small pot; another wave is focused on the field of teabags, the earlier ones are in Chali tea. Later and younger, there are Cha Xiaokong, Haishicha and so on.
“Being ration tea for young people” is the card point of this wave of new teabags. The two key words “young people” ration tea”, the former means that the crowd is more focused, and to a certain extent, the traditional tea-drinking group of “Uncle Bird Walker” is abandoned; while the latter means that the positioning of tea is more focused Daily consumption, not gift consumption.
The Decline of Lipton
For a long time before this, 80% of the sales of Chinese tea, especially high-end tea, were mostly gifts. This also leads to a good story, and ordinary tea with good packaging can be sold at sky-high prices. In the process of debunking lies again and again, consumers feel full of routines.
In the process of excessively raising the cultural value of tea, the tea industry has also overdrawn the trust of consumers. In this market, let alone products that satisfy young people, general mass consumption is not well satisfied.
And Lipton, which is a few cents a pack, seems very conscience of the industry. With standardized and convenient products, Lipton has changed the way many people drink tea, and has consistently ranked first in the industry throughout the year. To this day, there is no one in China that can match it in terms of size. This is also the saying that “China’s 70,000 tea companies are not as good as a Lipton”.
However, as you can see, Lipton has been a decade of life from packaging to products, and sales have been declining both globally and in China over the years. After repeated reports of being sold by Unilever, in the 2020 annual report released last month, Unilever made it clear that it will complete the divestiture of Lipton by the end of this year.
Born in Lipton in 1890, it uses the method of “splicing tea”, that is, crushing tea leaves, combining good tea and secondary tea to make a standardized and quick-brewed portable tea bag. And quickly spread into supermarkets, hotels and other channels at low prices. Under the C-end and B-end take-all, Lipton became the world’s largest tea brand in one fell swoop.
Before 1992, my country’s tea industry did not have brand awareness, and more of it was produced and sold by tea farmers, not to mention standardized products. Moreover, drinking tea in the traditional sense involves warming up the pot, filling the tea, and waking up.A series of time-consuming and cumbersome processes such as tea and brewing (this is also one of the main reasons why Chinese tea cannot be produced like Starbucks).
The emergence of Lipton has greatly lowered and simplified the threshold for drinking tea. At the same time, it has stabilized the product taste and production process, which has also generated a pricing model that is closer to the value of the product, instead of the packaging and storytelling that is still widely used in the tea industry.
Many people may have this experience. When you buy tea, you don’t know what price is reasonable. If you buy it cheaply, you think it’s not good quality. If you buy it expensive, you will feel that you have been fooled.
This kind of consumer lacks trust in the product, and the product does not have a unified value measurement scale. It is widely present in the tea industry in my country today. Coupled with the limitation of production area and production capacity, and the lack of awareness of modern consumer products among employees, the current situation of my country’s tea industry, despite its high output, lags behind foreign countries in brand building. To put it ugly, the once questioned Tin Can Tea, as a local Chinese tea company, actually did a good job in brand building.
However, Lipton, who redefined the way of drinking tea in the past, has not kept up with the changes of consumers in the changes of the times, so that the brand is now farther and farther away from young people and even mainstream consumers. Now its impressions in the minds of consumers, more stay in the free gift of express hotels.
Someone is always thinking about knocking down Lipton
The players in the original market were not active enough, and new demands are emerging. Ever since, new products have the opportunity to fill the market space.
Calculating, it has been 30 years since Lipton brought the tea bag category to China. Thirty years later, Lipton is still Lipton back then, and consumers have undergone several waves of generational changes. Moreover, although there have been many more brands of teabags in recent years, most of them have stayed at Lipton’s second place, and even some brands still follow the Lipton B-end + C-end two-leg walking model.
But time has come to these two years, and some changes have begun. The innovations that occurred in the field of instant coffee before this, started with three and a half meals, and brought a wave of rhythm from instant coffee to specialty instant coffee.
Similarly, new processes and product forms, lovely visual images and marketing methods have also appeared in the field of tea bags.
Look at the product first. The new wave of tea bag products generally adopts the method of blending tea to enrich the taste. The product types can be roughly divided into three categories: fruity tea with tea, herbal tea with tea, and tea with a health concept. The first typical and explosive product is peach oolong, which is basically the standard equipment of each manufacturer; the second typical product is osmanthus oolong, and the third representative product is red bean barley tea.
Let’s talk about the new technology. As mentioned above, Lipton’s method is to break the whole tea leaves and mix them with secondary tea. And the brands represented by ChaliFirst of all, the raw materials are upgraded. The whole tea bag is made of whole tea, including Hey Tea and Nai Xue.
The other method is similar to three and a half meals, cold brewing the tea leaves. After extraction and filtration, the tea soup is extracted into powder by freeze-drying, and then consumers only need to open it for brewing. This category of products has been further improved in terms of convenience, which represents the brand of Seven Day Hara.
However, there may be consumers who think that the form of tea powder is still “almost”, so there is a third type, the so-called “super-extracted tea.” That is, through a purely physical processing technology, the raw leaf tea can quickly produce tea in cold water, so that it can be soaked in cold water for five minutes to obtain a cup of “cold tea”. Representative brands in this category: including Jeep and Cha Xiaokong.
Cha Xiaokong
In addition to the products, the new wave of bag tea brands are also very tight-lipped in terms of appearance and gameplay. Looking at the notes on these tea bags in the Xiaohongshu book, the eyes are full of “cute too much to move my eyes” and “at the beginning I was attracted by the value of the face”.
Yan value is really useful for young people in this class. Just look at the brands like Sandton and Huaxizi. The outer packaging looks good, and the delivery of cups, small stickers, etc. are already standard operations. Take a look at the brand in the picture below, Haishicha. The tea bags are designed directly into small clothes, and the packaging box is a small wardrobe. Searching for its products on Xiaohongshu, the pig girls really play various tricks on these tea bags.
Children Tea
Of course, most of the tea bags have taken a relatively stable route, but I have also worked hard on the packaging and concepts. All in all, it’s just like young people, good-looking, fun, and creative, just go to the picture to give everyone a taste.
Left: Xicha Right: Tea Yanyue Color
At the same time, in order to make tea drinking become the daily consumption of young people, that is, to become the “ration tea” for young people. Basically, each company has launched the concept of “one tea a day”, and launched a week set, corresponding to 7 different flavors.
So far, from the convenience, product image, product concept, tea bags, began to rejuvenate in all aspects. Under this wave of operations, the price is also much higher than Lipton. Lipton’s 25-pack (45g) oolong tea bag is priced at 14.9 yuan. The price of 7 packs (25 grams) of the Hey Tea Weekly Tea Gift Box is 48 yuan, which is more than three times the price per gram.
Even so, many people are willing to pay for it. According to the category transaction data of Tmall, the growth rate of combination substitute tea and combination flower nectar tea is the fastest in 2020, and the growth rate of cold brew tea is 10 times that of the overall category.
However, compared with Lipton, the sales of several relatively top brands are still not in the same order of magnitude. Of course, this also means that there is still a lot of room for growth in this category, and there is currently no leading brand like Sandunban in the field of tea bags, and the entire market is still relatively fragmented.
It is foreseeable that there will be a battle of “three and a half tea bags”. We will also continue to pay attention to the development trends in this field and present them to you as representative cases of Chinese new brand innovation.